Apsu, is equally Sumerian. It
would be strange indeed if the Sumerians had not evolved a Dragon
myth,(2) for the Dragon combat is the most obvious of nature myths and
is found in most mythologies of Europe and the Near East. The trailing
storm-clouds suggest his serpent form, his fiery tongue is seen in the
forked lightning, and, though he may darken the world for a time,
the Sun-god will always be victorious. In Egypt the myth of "the
Overthrowing of Apep, the enemy of Ra" presents a close parallel to that
of Tiamat;(3) but of all Eastern mythologies that of the Chinese
has inspired in art the most beautiful treatment of the Dragon, who,
however, under his varied forms was for them essentially beneficent.
Doubtless the Semites of Babylonia had their own versions of the Dragon
combat, both before and after their arrival on the Euphrates, but the
particular version which the priests of Babylon wove into their epic is
not one of them.

(1) See E. de Sarzec, _Decouvertes en Chaldee_, pl. xliv,
Fig. 2, and Heuzey, _Catalogue des antiquites chaldeennes_,
p. 281.

(2) In his very interesting study of "Sumerian and Akkadian
Views of Beginnings", contributed to the _Journ. of the
Amer. Or. Soc._, Vol. XXXVI (1916), pp. 274 ff., Professor
Jastrow suggests that the Dragon combat in the Semitic-
Babylonian Creation poem is of Semitic not Sumerian origin.
He does not examine the evidence of the poem itself in
detail, but bases the suggestion mainly on the two
hypotheses, that the Dragon combat of the poem was suggested
by the winter storms and floods of the Euphrates Valley, and
that the Sumerians came from a mountain region where water
was not plentiful. If we grant both assumptions, the
suggested conclusion does not seem to me necessarily to
follow, in view of the evidence we now possess as to the
remote date of the Sumerian settlement in the Euphrates
Valley. Some evidence may still be held to point to a
mountain home for the proto-Sumerians, such as the name of
their early goddess Ninkharsagga, "the Lady of the
Mountains". But, as we must now regard Babylonia itself as
the cradle of their civilization, other data tend to lose
something of their apparent significance. It is true that
the same Sumerian sign means "land" and "mountain"; but it
may have been difficult to obtain an intelligible profile